Traditional IP networks are built with very limited capacity planning and design optimization. These networks can only provide a best-effort service without performance guarantees. However, customer expectations can only be met if IP networks are designed to provide predictable performance. In particular, network service providers have to support bandwidth guarantees for their virtual private network (VPN) customers.
In addition, included in any network design considerations, is the fact that there are several types of network routers that may be used in a given network. For instance, a packet switch such as Lucent's PacketStar™ (from Lucent Technologies, Inc. of Murray Hill, N.J.) IP Switch supports novel traffic scheduling and buffer management capabilities, including per-flow queuing with weighted fair queuing (WFQ) and longest-queue drop (LQD), which enable minimum bandwidth guarantees for VPNs while achieving a very high level of resource utilization. It is also known that existing legacy routers, on the other hand, do not support adequate flow isolation and their first-in-first-out (FIFO) scheduling, even when combined with the random early detection (RED) buffer management policy, results in little control over the bandwidth sharing among VPNs and throughput is mostly dictated by the dynamic properties of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which is the dominant transport protocol used in IP networks.
Accordingly, there is a need for a network design tool that permits users, i.e., network designers, to design IP networks having the same (homogeneous) or different (heterogeneous) types of routers which provide substantial performance guarantees for a variety of applications such as, for example, VPN. Specifically, there is a need for a design tool which: automatically computes worst-case and optimistic link capacity requirements based on a designer's specifications; optimizes the network topology; and determines optimal router placement in the network.